An Analysis of the Ensemble Reception Rewards (Why They are not as bad as you think)

[Starakira]

A lot of people say that the new rewards are underwhelming, so I decided to test the rewards myself. So here is my analysis based on the results of my rigorous testing.

Fun Fact : I've been told that apparently there's a glitch so that you can farm for extra Reverb's combat pages by equipping them on an unused Key Page and redoing the Reception, but I've not tested it yet.

TLDR : These Key Pages are already strong enough individually, simply because of Nuovo Fabric, making them very hard to die. So, my conclusion is I don’t agree with the people that say they’re underwhelming, except for the ones that are glaringly bad. Some are weaker than others, yes, but some of the passives can also be considered broken. This doesn't mean that I don't agree with considered improvements.

The details for each individual rewards will be listed below.

Key Pages

Philip :
It's a straight upgrade from the Crying Children, a pretty significant one at that. His exclusive combat pages is pretty niche, but can really build up burn stacks. Put him in Malkuth's Floor for maximum effectiveness.

Eileen :
I think this is the second best Key Page of the set, Huge improvements for smoke decks and great offensive support. Not really much else to say besides that this page is really strong. You can put her anywhere and you'll be fine.

Greta :
Great stats, good passive. Pretty tanky with Grit and All for Hana. You can also use Toughness, but I think it's overkill. Also, uhh... Cruelty exists. It goes without saying that she works best on Hod's floor.

Bremen :
All good all-around debuffer, Heavy synergy with a smoke build using Smoke Addiction for heavy paralysis debuff. Very flexible and doesn't need a specific floor.

Oswald :
This one is pretty niche, but it's a niche that he does really well. Ironically synergizes really well with Emma's passive, High-level Acrobatics, since usually the cards that have 3+ different dice also cost 3+ light. I use a discard build for this deck with Impugnatio Ultima and Daring Decicion, so I put him on Tiphereth's floor. Now not only he gets godly rolls, but he can also consistently debuff with Nihil's E.G.O Page (for maximum Clown effect).

Tanya :
Another Key Page that keeps me alive forever? Don't mind if I do. With her, you can try the more risky builds such as Reindeer Treatment and Kizuna. You can put her anywhere, but I still think she works best on Gebura's Floor.

Jae-Heon :
The worst one of the set, Puppet Strings is nice, but overcosted for what it does. I think it can increase both strength and endurance and it will still be fine. Right now, it doesn't do much else and hardly synergizes with anything. Maybe put him in Chesed's floor?

Elena :
The third best of the set in my opinion. Same deal with Tanya, but better. She's a monster with Reindeer Treatment and can easily recover her health to full each turn. Synergizes well with Small Beak on Binah's floor for infinite light regen and also on Gebura's floor with Fear of Water and Vampirism.

Pluto :
Pretty much the best Key Page of the set. Contract give you net gain of 2 lights per scene and +1 power to all dice. The health lost barely matters if you use the Haulers and you can even turn it into an advantage with R Corp's 'HP lost' passives. If you're not using Hauler passives, I recommend putting him in the floor with sustain such as Netzcach's, Gebura's or Hokma's.

Argalia :
Last but almost least, we got the Blue Sicko himself. His Resonance is very RNG heavy with very minimal support. Vibration is also a mechanic unique to Argalia, so you can't even use it as an attribution. I think it's the worst designed passive in the game so far. In my test results, the sweet spot to trigger Resonance is 5-6 vibrations. I guess you can also use him on Yesod's floor with Unchained Wrath and set your vibration to 1, if you want to guarantee the effect. His saving grace from being the worst from the set are his speed dice range and his ranged immunity. His ranged immunity is still a wild card right now. It can be absolutely amazing or completely useless depending on future contents.

Combat Pages

Rekindled Strike :
Philip's exclusive. Requires a very specific build. Can cause heavy burn stack when used in conjunction with Furious Fire Rending the Skies. You can also copy the Blazing Strikes with clone and use Happy Memories to lower their cost further, but that is too much work to be worth it. Besides, I already have a better build that uses the same Abnormality Page.

Ever-spinning Gearwheel :
The best combat page reward. It's not exclusive, but you probably still want to use it with Eileen anyway. Not a lot to say besides that is just a really good smoke card.

Mince :
5 bleed in a 2 cost? Yes, please!

Chorus : Probably can keep the Combat Start effect, but I don't mind it too much if it's a once-used effect. The rolls are high enough for a 3 cost (same as Impugnatio Ultima), so I think the Combat Start effect is just extra.

Let's Have Some Fun :
Highest light regen in the game right now. There's a reason to use it over Will of the City if you don't want to ruin your discard synergy with Margin.

Beatdown :
Tanya's exclusive. I see a lot of people underestimate Beatdown. After some testing, I still think it's pretty good. Helps greatly reduce the damage you take while proccing those When Hit effects.

Ghghgh :
It's a sidegrade to Creak... an Urban Nightmare combat page. It's so bad that I have no words.

Bloodspreading :
OP mass attack. Imagine Mimicry that hits 5 people at once. Elena's exclusive. A lot of people don't like that it exhausts on use, but I'm the opposite. It's a mass attack that you'll want to wait to use anyway and pretty much won't be needing after that, so the fact that it exhaust helps to not clutter the deck.

Suspicious Contract :
Pretty much only useful on a discard deck. The rolls are so low that it's not worth to play it individually.

Largo :
It's the best '0 Cost Restore 1 Light' combat page, but it's Argalia's exclusive. Not much else to say except that it's part of the vibration management tool for Argalia.

Allegro :
Argalia's exclusive. The only way you can gain vibration. Pretty meh overall.

Resonant Scythe :
Argalia's exclusive. Not as bad as Ghghgh, but still, not much else going on except to deal 3 extra damage.

Trails of Blue :
The best Argalia's exclusive. It's the only way to have power nullification (besides Lamp and Big Eyes) and doesn't have any drawback.

Tempestuous Danza :
The final Argalia's exclusive combat page. It's just a mass attack that deals flat damage. Probably meant to be used with the vibration mechanic. I agree with the opinion that this page doesn't need to be exhausted on use.

[Sonicrider2]

The are by no means weak, but they are not thematic to their bossfights. Tough 4 light 3 speed basically empty beatsticks is not what people expect from the most hyped group of the whole game. They should be more special/unique.

[CarThief]

Eh, Puppet Strings is gonna need a lotta more love then just that. It's awful. If it was given to all allies, it'd be a smidge better, but still outperformed by Nikolai considering it's not a consistent +1 strenght.

Personally, i like the new globally accessible puppet card, for my Prescript decks, atleast. Any card that starts with a defensive roll first is good in my eyes, eats up the big hitters and lets you sneak in two hits for emotion gain. And also useful for countering 3-dice cards.

And blue boi himself is probably the second worst ensemble page (Puppeteer currently being worst). It's way too RNG-reliant. If it was less RNG reliant (and didn't prevent us from running a Singleton deck), he'd be a lot more useful. If only his exclusive pages where E.G.O cards instead of burdens in the bookshelf...

Hm, just a random idea, but what if Resonance applied +1 Vibration on hit, Vibration stacking up to 6 maybe (clearing itself on 7 or so), and he'd get +1 power per 2 stacks vs enemies afflicted by Vibration? Maybe with a finale where clearing a stack gets him cards/light?

[Dima green]

I do have to politely annd strongly disagree on the assortment of calling Ensemble key pages individually "strong"

Each and every one of them except Philip fall behind what we previously recieved as rewards from a LOT of previous invitations(and no, being side-grades to Hana or SotC III row is alright, variety is cool and they don't necessarily have to completely outpower them but in this case they straight up fall behind)

Tl;dr: key pages having grit 1.5 does not make them strong, it is however a really nice basis for their main passives that are by all means what actually makes a page(if that was the case Boris would be meta but his main strength comes from Punishment + smoke)

As for Philip, yes. He received a lot of passives from his past self that supplement his strength and that do make him a good page along with his 2 whole ults

Eileen having to rely on combat pages not from 1, not 2, not even 3 but 4 techlines below is a weakness especially when her entire kit besides evade die(lul) revolves around using smoke and smoke only. Not great, not terrible, but alright, close to strong at least

Greta along with each and every one of the ensemble members does not have good stats. I am sorry for having to specify that but "great" Implies something to be highly above average... Which is true if you compare it to SotC I techline with Lowell, Kalo and Nemo having 94~ hp but here in impuritas and below every key page has 104~ hp, 54~ sr, 2-7/1-8 speed and two endured resistances(4 in the case of Harold/Olivier), Greta in specific lacking those 2 endured resistances. Ensemble is either below average(Eileen & Greta) which is what's considered weak or average which is totally fine but stats ain't the only thing

Bremen being a good debuffer sounds... Slightly questionable to me when they deal 1 feeble and 1 paralysis each scene and you have Purple tear on pierce stance and laceration so I'll leave it as that

Oswald is "niche" because he has only one passive to strength? I really think that's called "lacking in passives" Not something that's comfortable to some people

On that topic I'd like to quickly mention how severy overestimated "synergies" With Ensemble are. There are cases of Red Mist and Myo of course but at this point people are just slapping passives that could and always have been great on any other page and calling it a good symergy? I mean, alright I guess I am just too dumb to understand how it works(oh and don't you even bring up passive slots, you have more than enough of them on nearly every good page already)

I wil not discuss Tanya as someone who puts kizuna not to kill off their librarians faster for quick solo engine doesn't have long to live anyway

Jae Hoon. Again, what is it with masking straight up weal and underpowered passives as "niche"? Puppet strings is just unrelenting with a tiny conditional buff, there's nothing you can do about it

Elena is a sweeper from SotC II(where we get Nikolai who is our first 4 light, speed III page) that was given 1 strength, is that really something you consider strong at this point of the game? Ig that is that and this is this

Pluto's alright I suppose, at least they gave him one sturdy passive.

We both know who Argalia is however I do want to remind you that literally no one in the City uses ranged weaponry and as of right now we have 2.05 ranged receptions out of all existing ones(1 fullstop + 0,5 Thumb since half of the time they use melee cards and +0,3 R corp I +0,25 R corp II)

[DoT]

Everything is either Be immortal or Gain + Power, Except for bremen who was the only person to actually have a passive which inflicts debuffs, but just 1 passive

It's not that the rewards were "Bad" its that they weren't anything special, and you only get 1 page per player, which are just either super high rolls, or Jae-heongs Worthless green combat page that is weaker then creak

Were still playing with the same combat pages since SOTC, because they hardly gave us any rewards, its boring

[snek]

Yeah, 8/10 of them being practically basic Speed 3 4 Light pages to slot in anything to act as standard beatsticks is pretty embarrassing for a group that has near enough coordinated events since the start of Urban Plague. Only Philip and Eileen have enough going for them that warrant specific setups (and Philip is just a pure upgrade of his old page!). All of them really should get expanded sets of exclusive cards and passives to boot so that they're either not pure passive fodder (Greta has no resistances, you're better off slotting her into anyone with All for Hana) or just a blank page with Grit+ attached.

Vibration needs serious expansion and reworking, even with tweaking the random variation is incredibly unreliable and has brought me to deadhanding even with Battle Ready and Four Trigrams, the +power doesn't even work for that matter! I also find Argalia's EL gen rate to be extremely bad too, I've ended fights with everyone at EL4 while Argalia sits at EL2. Of the Colours he's not only the worst in terms of power, he's also by far the most boring of them too. Resonance is probably by far the worst mechanical passive just by virtue of how unreliable it is. He needs more passives to make him stand out and more exclusive cards that toy with Vibration, +power (like Resonate, which we never got for some reason), reduce cost if speed dice matches vibration stack, +effects, so on.

Something he could do is have an expanded hand and deck size, like using a second row on the hand? Just anything to make him genuinely unique just like the other Colours that isn't just a barely functional passive.

[FlavorTown]

Originally posted by snek:

Something he could do is have an expanded hand and deck size, like using a second row on the hand?

We know that maximum hand size is 10 because bullets allows you to have more than 8 cards in hand, they could expand his hand size by giving him Danza as card tied to him by passive and let you have 9 cards in normal deck, while boosting his natural max hand size to 10. But I disagree that he is not unique, he is the most unique key page in the game since he plays completely differently than everyone else all thanks to vibration even if it's currently a bit underwhelming

[Mastema]

Half of them just seem like fillers instead of the real contestants on main floors you'd use against receptions/bosses unless the enemy has some sort of conditional mechanism that would make one or two of em' shine in that situation. Like you'd atleast expect the big bad scythe wielding ape to have somewhat of a power-spike and demolishing power instead he has unnecessarily complicated gimmick that doesn't do ♥♥♥♥ compared to rest of the colors. As others have stated Philip, Elena, Bremen and Eilieen seem to be the best out of the bunch, rest could work if you decide to mix them up with other keypages/harvest the attributes out and slap them on somebody else who'd do the job better.

[(● ◡ ●)]

just need moar cards
Pages is another discuss, but i much more expect building big and maybe good decks after this gauntlet.

[snek]

Originally posted by FlavorTown:

Originally posted by snek:

Something he could do is have an expanded hand and deck size, like using a second row on the hand?

We know that maximum hand size is 10 because bullets allows you to have more than 8 cards in hand, they could expand his hand size by giving him Danza as card tied to him by passive and let you have 9 cards in normal deck, while boosting his natural max hand size to 10. But I disagree that he is not unique, he is the most unique key page in the game since he plays completely differently than everyone else all thanks to vibration even if it's currently a bit underwhelming

You have to toy with a status effect that prefers to not cooperate with you, and even if it does it's still subject to RNG of speed dice. I'd say that's hardly unique when it's "slap twice with allegro and hope the next turn you roll a 4 in speed and then in future turns hope the vibration stack doesn't swing wildly against you".

They can have his other unique being a second row of cards above the first usual row (alongside the special page tab) so there isn't the problem of cards obscuring the handswap icon.
Could also have something that lets him build up to a nerfed version of Final Impromptu? Something kinda like how Furioso takes all 9 BS cards being used, I guess Argalia could be stacking based on the number of times Resonance has procced, so at X stacks Improptu is usable?

[FlavorTown]

Originally posted by snek:

I'd say that's hardly unique when it's "slap twice with allegro and hope the next turn you roll a 4 in speed and then in future turns hope the vibration stack doesn't swing wildly against you".

So what would be even close to similar? smoke, bleed, paralysis, burn don't care for number of stacks, you play them against enemy cards, the more stacks applied the better. Vibration? Every single application or reduction of stacks matters, you can't just play it against enemy dice and hope that you're going to apply 4 stacks or only 2, or reduce them by 1 because while everything else just demands you apply any number of stacks Vibration demands you apply correct number of stacks. Applying 4 and playing cards on that is starting point of Vibration which is already more complicated then any other status effect

[snek]

I think having a mechanic that not only relies on you slapping vibration to the way you want but also hoping you get good RNG on not just speed dice rolls within that range AND also hoping in subsequent turns it doesn't fluctuate wildly (it can fluctuate from a range of -3 to +3, on an effect that maxes at 7 when you want a range between 4 and 6. All of that is pretty bad when it's how your page actually gains power and otherwise gets draw without draw pages (the best of which are singleton required, which play terribly for him atm) when Fervor is reached pretty easily, PT gets +2 just from existing, Nikolai gives +1 to everyone just for existing basically, Mirinae gives tons of +s from existing, Xiao gets multiple EGO pages and +powers from just existing long enough, and so on.

It'd be nice if it wasn't what his page absolutely hinged on, like make it something for page effects, and hitting it builds up a counter for a nerfed Final Impromptu like I mentioned previously, as it stands he runs a ton of uncertainty where the strongest characters in the game have a ton of certainty running with them.

[Starshimmer]

for all the argalia talk here ill put in my two cents cuz ive spent now 12 or so hours messing with his keypage alone and the best way i found to get him to work is to take both draw passives from sayo and the index then pray to god vibration dusent bug out (yes fun fact vibration as a status effect is very buggy and emanys can seemingly gain extra stacks from nothing one time i used allegro once on a target and once on a differnt target won both the clashes and somehow one of them ended up with 7 vibration and the other had 3 i was so confused

[Takomo]

Originally posted by Starshimmer:

for all the argalia talk here ill put in my two cents cuz ive spent now 12 or so hours messing with his keypage alone and the best way i found to get him to work is to take both draw passives from sayo and the index then pray to god vibration dusent bug out (yes fun fact vibration as a status effect is very buggy and emanys can seemingly gain extra stacks from nothing one time i used allegro once on a target and once on a differnt target won both the clashes and somehow one of them ended up with 7 vibration and the other had 3 i was so confused

from what I understand the changes in vibration stacks is an intended thing. when a target with vibration gets hit by a card that doesn't specifically alter it then it just randomly gains or loses 1,2 or 3 stacks (it's just not included in the status description for some reason or so my understanding goes.) and even then it seems its broken currently anyway since a lot of people are saying that they don't get the bonuses from matching with it anyway.

[winter wave]

i think philip is better on binah than malkuth since he's not immune to burn and chi wen is really good on him

[Big Cheese Gaming]

oh you are the guy who did the post on reddit.

to put it simply i have to disagree with your statement,while Nuevo fabric is good,is not nearly as good of a passive to make a page good.I don't wanna take 30 years to write a resume but to put it more simply,if you need to attribute passives for a page to be decent/good,then it's pretty crap,you have a limited amount of passive to put on your pages,Health hauler for exemple have 4 copies and that's it.
You also need to keep in mind that you Have to compare the page with when they were given,aka the last episode,aka it's pretty mediocre compared to Oliver,Purple Tear,Xiao,Nikolai,ect

Let's not talk about the cards,they are just too sad,Eileen seems pretty good,and Arga has a grand total of 2 good cards,0 cost one and trails of blue,Mince is good for bleed i guess,Oswald's light regen is good ,but i'd rather get more draw since PM doesn't want us to get a 0 cost 1 light regent/draw and more without drawbacks,you also get only one so yea.

All in all if these pages/cards were given is Sotc then yea dude i would say they are pretty good (for the most part),but at this point we should get better things.

Tbh i think PM is planning something with these but yea,it's just theory